Kerx's page

1) Same as everyone else: save stats (Wis/Con/Dex). Dex also applies to AC and TAC so be sure to bump it a fair bit, the chain shirt you ought wear shouldn't be a problem for the dex cap.

2) That's a bit of a groty question for a lot of the people who frown on power-gaming. To parrot a variation of what will be inevitably said by someone: "having an interesting character is more important than a mechanically robust one." Now that that's out of the way the question is whether or not your friend is willing to be boring and go human because humans are the catch-all of all catch-alls. Their heritages are all solid and their feats allow you to do things like have 2 of the 1st level bard feats at first level.

3) Lore or Polymath, bardic lore feels good as a player and versatile performance lets you just focus on being good at performance instead of rating out skill increases to stay viable as a party face. The spells true strike and summon monster are both pretty usable so go hog wild with either. I don't recommend maestro because it feels like someone other than bard should be spending the action economy for healing in this game and their name is cleric.

4) Being a human means you can take another 1st level feat via (bards get class feats in their progression only on even levels and from Muse) if that's what you mean, In that case I'd grab any of them. Every 1st level bard feat is at least decent. 4th level I'd say cantrip expansion because cantrips are utilitous and can be used creatively by players to make the game more enjoyable for everyone. Unless you want to do steady spellcasting by RAW (don't. Technically it makes bards immune to counterspelling).

5) Performance. It's kind of your thing as a bard. You should roll it a lot as a bard. If you aren't idk what you're doing as a bard.

3 I think, I could definately go for rage as a sort of stance like ability that feels like more of a trade-off. ATM it feels like it's only a matter of whether my party's barbarian has the action economy to do rage and hit people and he's said as much on multiple occasions.

When I think rage I think of people getting extremely angry, flying off the handle in a berserking deathblossom and then all tuckered out 6 seconds in because they rolled a 3 on a d20.

I genuinely don't understand this change. I don't think it fits within the overall design philosophy of this system thus far and it just confuses me that this is the direction they'd take this. Maybe I've powergamed too much in my life and I'm ignoring the funny little kinda pointless things (Waking Nightmare) they put in that I do think are fun in a way (but only if you want to piss people off in the case of Waking Nightmare).

No one said you had to play pathfinder in Golarion or use the other paladins. You can anyways just not, that's the beauty of tabletop.

I don't know why I'm so surprised people dedicated to Paladin are dying on a seemingly arbitrary hill because they refuse to compromise but hey, we're here now.

Did I miss a substantial balance change that turned them into clerics or fighters (took away their magic hands or weapons)?

Large+ creatures in the proposed scenario become monumentally easier to flank, which is (I think) less intuitive. For medium creatures this does make flanking just slightly easier which buffs rogue and makes it so that new players don't have to think as hard about flanking which I support.

Flanking also doesn't only mean sides. There is room in most definitions (if not an "especially:" line) for the interpretation of it meaning any two opposite sides. In this case all of our pieces will unerringly occupy rectangles of variable dimensions so I wouldn't say that this isn't intuitive.

I mean, "ki points" don't exist anymore so let me just check the CRB and see what this power is about because I don't remember it being back...

This is the playtest forum my dude. Got me hungering for a monk feat to be added that does something like this.

Anyhow, answer is yes you would always get ki from any living creature. Your confusion seems to lie within the flavor text they wove into the rules text there, understandable.

Beginning with the fact that there seems to be no price for carts/wagons/covered wagons listed within the book, continuing to the part where I haven't been able to find any rules regarding drag values relative to bulk values, and ending with the part where I understand this is reasonably arbitrary.

Honestly it's mostly about the pricing of a cart not being there that surprised/irked me. In my own campaign I'm pretty sure I made it the proportional pricing of renting for a day vs buying a pack animal applied to 25 miles of carriage rental (around a day of 30ft movement travel, which is an encumbered horse's speed) and then divided by four because carts are very much not carriages. ((10*(2*5))/4)

The price winds up being 25 silver by this logic/math.

The other question I can't see having been answered is how much my players can shove into said cart but since it seems finding out how much a horse or pack animal can carry is an adventure unto itself I'll be sparing myself from that activity.

They'd be better off bringing up the dice and abilities of other weapons than penalizing d12 weapons.

THIS.

d6s are for rogues and they could honestly also be better since they get hard out-scaled by big boy magic weapon dice if you aren't specifically a rogue doing sneak attack damage 100% of the time (unrealistic if you also like being alive).

d4s are the punchline to some sort of joke but they're just so genuinely bad (in a system that adds damage dice for item progression) that I understand the setup for that joke is as much of a waste of time as reading their entries.

d10s look like they're in a pretty decent place when they have reach. The weapons granting you the privilege of having MAP apply on your swings after you attempt a moderately helpful maneuver seem kinda insulting, much rather get a bonus to doing the given maneuver with the weapon which is designed in a way that makes it easier with the weapon. Having a free hand necessary for things like trip make me mentally picture my character crouching, knees at 45 degree angles, to grab an orcish warrior's calves one-handed before attempting to topple him as opposed to the smooth sweep the leg I want to imagine (dex for trip when?).

There still should be acrobatics as a skill but yeah the way it works right now is funky at best. I feel like characters should be allowed to use acrobatics to jump and climb at the very least. On that matter why the hell is jump under a str based skill anyways? How many times have you seen a Schwarzenegger-esque long jumper, high jumper, or climber?
Pretty sure this is what you meant by

stole all the utility that could have been in Acrobatics.

but I had that epiphany while typing and now we're here.

Stitched together from pieces of ghoul skin, this

suit of +1 hide grants you a +1 item bonus to saving throws against
disease and paralysis

Taking a wild guess and saying this shouldn't be an item bonus since the item bonus conferred by +1 would already apply to any of the given saves. Item bonuses not stacking means I'm reasonably certain the +1 item bonus vs disease and paralysis is therefore useless.

Hey now, Waking Nightmare is the most useful power in the game if you want to make the other people at the table to hate you extend your gaming experience's length, thereby enriching it.

"To cast a spell from a wand, you must have the spell on your spell list..."

Spell list is distinct from spell repertoire